When I was researching another post I found out that Sherri Tepper was releasing a new book.  She doesn’t do that often anymore so I was excited.  It is the third in the series with A Plague of Angels and The Waters Rising.  I had read both of those books and they weren’t my favorites of hers.  I didn’t realize they went together.  In my defense they were published years apart and I had forgot the plot of the first long before I read the second.  I decided to go back and read those two again before reading the new book in order to put it in proper context.

Tepper’s books are so hard to summarize.  It all goes together in the book but when you try to explain that there are archetypal villages and gang-run cities and a pastoral civilization and a village based around an old nuclear reactor run by a crazy woman who has an army of malfunctioning androids, you sound like a loon.  That’s before you add in the talking animals.

There are always images in her books that stay with me.  In this one it was the Sisters of the Trees.  The story takes place in a future southwest U.S. after an ecological disaster.  These women plant trees wherever they can.  They have to plant 10,000 trees just to be able to call themselves part of the Sisterhood. They aren’t centralized.  They are just individual women restoring the land one tree at a time.

I was at the library the other day and the new book was there.  My hand hovered over it but I didn’t pick it up.  I’m going to read The Waters Rising first.